


If we couldn't carry our dead inside us, we would be empty. (emptier, I mean.)

by failsafe



Category: Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Friendship, Gap Filler, Hurt/Comfort, Infidelity, M/M, Minor Character Death, POV Multiple, Pregnancy, References to Drug Use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-03
Updated: 2013-07-03
Packaged: 2017-12-17 13:22:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/868021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/failsafe/pseuds/failsafe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Tuλa died, Kaldur needed something. Someone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If we couldn't carry our dead inside us, we would be empty. (emptier, I mean.)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sheeana](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sheeana/gifts).



> Dear Sheeana, maybe you understand what I wrote, because I don't. I tried to write something and it really got away from me, tonally. I don't know. I hope you enjoy this. I don't know what I was thinking. 
> 
> If anyone else reads this, I hope you enjoy it, too. This is supposed to be set sometime spring-ish 2015, as far as it's meant to fit within the canon timeline. The title is from [this asofterworld comic](http://asofterworld.com/index.php?id=981).

He had once asked Garth if he had ever wondered what would have happened had their roles been reserved.

He told him he hadn't either.

No looking back. No regrets. That had been the implication.

But now Kaldur'ahm realized with the full force of the silence that followed a loss to the Team that he should never have been so sure that he wouldn't look back, wouldn't regret.

Gentle hands touched his arm and some with vision instinctively drawn to detail traced fingertips along the tattoos that coiled around them, but many of the hands were still gloved and rough and made him feel uneasy with the kind of friction that presented itself on the surface world. He also noted that each face, each condolence blurred one into the other and that each time anyone spoke to him the condolences felt a little less his own.

Tuλa had never been his. Not once and never even for a moment. For a short time, during the time of his distraction and his naivete, he had believed it a given that she one day would be, that she would have known what he felt and come to return it—in time if not right away. But Kaldur had learned better. He had become _better_ , having no such lofty expectations of others' feelings toward himself. He had never even tried again to impose his plans for another's life upon them. At least, not with respect to their personal lives.

And yet he made decisions that changed people's lives every day. That was the responsibility and the risk that came with being a leader.

Kaldur lifted his gaze and straightened his posture. He lowered his hands down to his sides where he hand been gripping both his arms around himself, shielding them from the rough touch of others who were grieving, watching and expecting him to do the same. He ached for some response, some release, but no matter how he pleaded with the burning in his head, the ache behind his eyes, no water would pour from them. He truly wished that it would, if only so he might have some way to touch, to actually feel his home inside himself. Only that was what he feared. With Tuλa gone and so many foreboding things ahead, almost mocking her sacrifice, he did not really believe he would ever be going _home_ again.

The bottom of his foot scuffed across the floor and he began to move, each step a little stronger as he laid eyes on Nightwing, tucked away in a shadow in the corner, arms folded, back leaning against the wall.

“Hey, Kaldur,” said a girl's voice as someone stepped into his way just before he reached his destination.

“... Hello, Zatanna,” Kaldur recognized after a momentary start. She hadn't sounded like herself in his head. He was still hearing another woman's final cry of pain and the brave murmurs before her final departure.

“Can I get you anything?” Zatanna asked eagerly. And Kaldur knew that she had faced loss—a great loss, the result of her own decision, in the field, a part of the Team. He truly appreciated the offer, the consideration, so he considered it. He could think of nothing. He took an audible breath and lightly shook his head, forcing a small, reserved smile.

“No. Thank you, Zatanna.” His attention turned very clearly toward Nightwing as he took a small side shuffle on his feet, not intending to be rude to their teammate but needing to go through these motions just the same. “Nightwing,” he addressed when he had a clear line of sight to the other's mask.

“Yeah. Hey, Kaldur,” Nightwing answered. His arms remained folded across his chest but their grip relaxed a little. Kaldur noted the way he had chosen the same greeting Zatanna had used. They had always done that, since first they met—echoing one another. Normally, Kaldur left it alone, but today he noted the way Zatanna moved back to the wall, but the opposite one that made up the corner where they stood. She remained close to Dick—to Nightwing, right now, Kaldur was careful to correct himself—but they did not touch. Not now. It was... no longer expected.

And normally, Kaldur would have not paid it any mind. But now he saw it, felt it—an echo. Zatanna and Dick had something that many people did, and between them it had been lucky enough to have been mutual for a time. First love, people called it, but now the turn of phrase turning over in his mind made Kaldur feel cold and very uncomfortably dry. He would never again look at her, never hear her voice again, and even if he had been content not to love her, not to have her for his own, he wondered how _they_ might face what he was now to live out for the remainder of his life. Never again, not even once, would he be able to see her, to comfort her, to know that she was alright, because now she wasn't. Finally he forced himself to recall the reason for his visit.

“... I think, perhaps, it is time,” he told Dick—Nightwing. He had been Robin when he had told him for the first time that one day he would lead this team. Dick Grayson had been born to lead this team, it had been said. But now Kaldur had learned better than that, too. Now he knew Dick better, and now he realized what it meant to lose someone—to lose someone, to have _that_ be what made you fit for this life. It wasn't fair to be considering a change of leadership now, but Kaldur could not stop himself. He glanced around the room at the scattered mourners, so many of them young—the brand new Robin, so quiet and leaned forward at the far end of a sofa, tucked in as tight and as small to the armrest of the couch as his skinny frame would let him be. They were all so young, being faced with this. At least the Team, in the beginning, had time before being faced with tragedy. Kaldur quickly gave Nightwing a nod, kept his gaze for a moment, and then turned before further discussion could be approached about the subject.

“Hey, where are you going?” Nightwing asked, and in his peripheral vision Kaldur noted that he'd unfolded his arms, stood up and away from the wall. Kaldur turned and held up his palm in a halting position and also a gesture of peace.

“There is something I must do,” he provided as an adequate excuse. And that should have been enough, but as he turned back away he spoke again. “I must absent myself from this wake—“ he began to explain further but then stopped himself, hoping no one had heard. This was too soon and by no means a formal wake for Tuλa. He was being selfish and unfair, but his feet kept moving against the dry, sometimes dusty floor and he kept going until he found himself in a zeta tube.

\- - -

Jade ran her foot along the soft fibers of a cheap, plush rug that was just larger to every side than their less plush mattress—a tired and worn, sometimes squeaking thing whose rougher edge chaffed along the inner edge of her foot toward the bottom edge. She was comfortable enough, her eyes on the ceiling and head on a pillow until she lifted the latter up and followed the length of her smooth, all-but-bare leg, from the cotton material of her shorts down to her toes which wriggled. Big toe edged just beneath the mattress but then she heard the squeak of the plumbing from the small bathroom which smelled of the high iron content in the water that turned their plastic white shower curtain yellow. She started and thought that she could smell the metallic water even with the door closed. She got her foot out away from the edge of the mattress and after a moment drew her leg back on top of it, folding them both as she reached over and picked up a tattered book with most of the identifying markings worn away, thumb brushing along the binding.

The book made a small sound as she opened the front cover carefully, chasing away the metal smell from her nose and replacing it with the faintly spicy smell that all old books contained along with several other faint traces like the cigarette smoke that had never come out of the ages-old carpet back home, when she'd had a home, though Sportsmaster would never have dirtied his lungs to smoke.

On the very first page, which was blank when it'd left the printing press, there was a very identifiable, laboriously printed scrawl in mostly-dark pencil lead.

 _A—_ sharp-angle-letter— _r—_ rounded gentle thing— _t—_ another sharp jut, interrupting— _e-m-i-s—_ neat succession, following by _L—_ big curlicue and neatly attached to the _i-a-n_ , each as ornamental as the last. Jade skipped past the next word, knowing it by heart and wishing to push it out of the same forever—maybe she'd marry that boy someday and do the same for herself. The rest of the information that followed was in neat little blocks in a less connected, bubbled script. _Northside Elementary, Gotham, Connect icut. If found please return to..._

It listed their old address, too, but Jade closed the book. It scared her a little—the way even a child that had grown up in the same place, the same way she had could trust the world so completely to even bother to ask that it be given back. And, well, it hadn't been.

She let the book slide down beside her on the mattress as the bathroom door reopened. Roy came through into the rest of the tiny apartment, a white towel draped around his shoulders, his only article of clothing a pair of dull red boxers. Jade let herself smile a little when she caught his blue eyes, searching for some kind of awareness in them. She knew he hadn't used anything today. And, well, she hadn't been one to judge at first, and maybe that meant she was complicit because it wasn't like she'd never taken anything, but lately she thought he was getting... worse. In more ways than one.

Lowering her hands down along her waist, Jade put a bit of her weight against her elbows and arched her back off the bed a little—demonstratively as she made the yawn caught in her throat a little deeper and more like a hum. Then she let herself back down with only slightly less grace and reached out with both hands, fingers apart and gently grasping.

“Come here,” she requested, not betraying how much she just wanted him to want to come to her at all. He had his days, at least, she thought as she looked down along her own body.

“I've got to—“ Roy started and it was a distant, quiet excuse, so she stopped him.

“Just for a minute,” she coaxed. She thought she saw a flicker of a smile on his face.

“You don't do just-a-minute, Chesh—“ But no, that was wrong, too.

“Jade,” she reminded him, glancing down at his left hand. There was still a simple, clean stainless steel band around his third finger. He plopped down on the foot of their mattress in the floor, knees bending before him and slightly apart as he let out a heavy sigh. He didn't move to turn toward her as he took either end of the towel and pulled it side to side, working his way down his back. He made a soft sound in his throat and she wondered if he thought it felt good. He never told her what felt good anymore. He had once. She was starting to wonder if he thought he felt anything. She knew he did—feel something, sometimes.

He didn't answer when he'd dried his back thoroughly down to the elastic waistband of his boxers. She'd lost him again. She thought about getting angry, but she had to think about more than how it stung now. Instead she rolled her body a little, coiling up for a moment before moving against her knees up behind him. Without a word, she wrapped both her bare arms, cool to the touch, against his freshly-showered, warm shoulders. Tilting her head to one side, she kissed the tendon between his shoulder and his neck. A second kiss went a bit higher.

“Jade—“ Roy objected.

“You're my husband,” she quipped. The fact that she'd ever deigned to _have_ a husband, after what marriage had been between her parents, meant a lot. She shut her eyes and let her eyelashes brush against his skin. She hoped she wasn't making the same exact mistake her mother had made.

“I'm not really anything,” he said, and more than the flatness to his tone, the forced chuckle that punctuated it, trying to lighten the blow with whatever he had left for her, for anyone at all, hurt.

“Roy, you _have—_ “ she began to explain but then there was a little hum to the right of the bed. One of two nondescript, high-tech- _enough,_ black cellphones was going off. Roy's. He didn't move to get it, but then she was draped over his shoulders. For a moment she wondered if she should ignore it, too, but maybe one of his _friends_ had something she didn't. And they needed whatever they could get.

She pecked another gentle kiss to his shoulder before getting his phone for him, tugging it free of its charger and sliding over to his side and just behind, perched up on her knees once more to look over his shoulder with mild, easy-to-relent curiosity. She wouldn't eavesdrop or spy if he didn't want her to. At this point, she still owed him that. But they were married, so if he would let her see she wanted to.

“Here,” she prompted as she made sure the phone was in his hand and then she just watched, waited. She felt like she had when she was a little girl—before Artemis was born, staring over Sportsmaster's shoulder while he assembled a weapon. She really wondered if this was all a mistake. She kissed Roy's shoulder again. She didn't want it to be.

“Don't know why they call me,” Roy commented, and Jade hated the power he had over her. Her heart rate perked up a little when she heard the tone in his voice that actually invited an answer.

“I think you'll find,” she said—evenly conversational because she didn't want to overreach, “that's a text message.”

“Close enough.” He brushed his thumb over the screen to wake it up. There was a picture of them on the home screen. Both of them were smiling like they owned the world. The picture wasn't very old, but that's the way it was—up and down, up and down. Over and over again.

“Who is it?”

“Kaldur,” Roy observed. He cleared his throat as he scrolled down to actually read the message. “Aqualad,” he added, a very soft correction.

Jade's eyes glanced over the curt text message, and she knew _Aqualad_ well enough to imagine it in his tone of voice.

 _Location?_ it asked, simply enough.

She very gently pushed her shins against Roy's back without upsetting his slightly leaned-forward position and lay back against their mattress, mostly in the center but a bit to Roy's usual side. She inhaled very deeply.

“... Maybe you should go see him,” she suggested, giving a little playful pat of her foot down alongside Roy's hip. Her fingers laced together over her body, somewhere beneath her breasts, and she fiddled with the comfortably soft and thin material of her shirt. She tugged at it a little and it showed a few inches of her light brown skin.

“Why?”

“I don't know. Just... maybe you should,” she pressed.

\- - -

 _Home_. That was his reply. He didn't know why he sent it. It wasn't like he'd given Kaldur a business card anytime lately. But then, the Justice League computer probably somehow kept track of him—even if he hadn't been Red Arrow, there might be something proprietary in his blood they knew about but didn't tell him. They did things like that. He didn't really blame them for not telling him anything, even though it made him angry.

His anger didn't really matter. It had accomplished its purpose. Only, he hadn't. At least, he hadn't managed to fulfill the only worthwhile purpose he'd ever found.

And he didn't really mean that to _hurt_ Jade, but it was true. If he couldn't fill the gap his existence had left, whatever they thought they had was just a moot point and worse than that probably an affront to something. Someone. To him, even though “he” was the one reaping the benefits.

This wasn't fair. To anyone. But it didn't matter that it wasn't fair to him. Not really.

So he really didn't know why he was following his feet down the squeaky, humid hallway to the stairs. At least the apartment was cooler than the building itself. That was something that Jade deserved, whether she needed it or not. He went down the stairs in rote and out onto the street level, and then he pressed Kaldur's name on the screen and lifted the phone to his ear.

\- - -

Jade picked up her simple, black, high-tech- _enough_ phone once she was alone. She could still feel the very cool, lingering touch of an automatic kiss he'd given her. It was like a machine—but he was still flesh and blood and bone. He just didn't seem to understand that.

She checked the time, made a mental note of it so she'd have some idea of how long Roy had been gone when he came back. She was curious. That, and she'd know how long it had been in case she started to get worried. She wanted to think she wouldn't. They were both capable of taking care of themselves. That had been one thing she'd liked about him.

She looked through her list of contacts, still on her back. It didn't take long to get to her sister—whose phone number she actually had now through no illicit means. Still, it wasn't like they talked very much. If she'd ever imagined a circumstance where she and Artemis were still in (even technical) willing contact again it would have been if they'd both moved more into the shades of gray that their parentage really hadn't left them much choice about fulfilling. But that wasn't exactly what had happened. She had kept moving toward gray, sure. But Artemis—Artemis had moved over toward white, or something. California sunlight.

Jade didn't make a call, didn't write a text. Instead she just gently tossed the phone back down onto the rug, still tethered to its charger chord.

Impulsively, she sat up and leaned over to the bottom corner of her side of the mattress, fished her hand beneath it, then flopped back down onto her back on Roy's side.

She stared at the plastic in her left hand. The fingers of her right gently brushed up and down the still defined line that traced out the musculature of her body, running right down the center. She read the little '+' again.

She really should tell someone.

\- - -

Kaldur was surprised and might have been a little disappointed if he'd had it in him to feel anymore deeply _disappointed_ , among other things, than he already did. When Roy had sent him a message back that simply said _'Home.'_ Kaldur thought he might have reasonably anticipated some invitation, some illumination on the current status of Roy's day to day life. He didn't know why, but he thought it might have made him feel better.

He knew basic things. It was in the Justice League's computer database (and filed in a courthouse, somewhere) that Roy Harper and Jade Nguyen had been married. He knew the last four states Roy had been in—in order and for no reason he could discern. But rather than seeing what place it was that Roy called home now, he was instead summoned to one of the many safe houses he had memorized—location, contents, general use, likely weaknesses, and so on—years before. In fact, Roy Harper had been the one to prompt such memorization.

He arrived first and let himself inside through some neat, agile climbing. Upon entering, he kept himself from thinking about why he was here—whatever the reason may be, even if he'd thought about it, he doubted he would have known—by examining the safe house's contents. He checked for tampering and for evidence of someone other than Roy or one of his allies having been there. Then he wondered how he might have known that either, given that Roy didn't operate with anywhere near so much technical sophistication as the Justice League or the Team did.

He settled for running a fingertip along the edge of a dusty card table that felt surprisingly sturdy and didn't budge when he tried jiggling it. What little light there was was a dark, low blue, edged with yellow because it radiated from distant street and security lights. The few cardboard boxes of supplies that were in plain sight on the table were innocuous enough—nonperishable food, common tools, paper, dried up ballpoint pens. The evident preparedness was at once admirable and a little hollow, like a husk of a time when there had been some more clear purpose behind it. In that regard, Kaldur was afraid he felt much the same. And he thought that perhaps—

Roy was at the door. Kaldur could ear the jangle of several keys. He decided not to presume about how hollow Roy felt, no matter how he suspected that he now shared true _empathy_ with him, in case his presumption might offend him or in some way make it more likely that someone else he cared about would feel this way. He simply straightened his posture and stood at the end of the table—his fingertips still rested at the juncture between the pressed board and plastic the table's surface was made from and the sturdier, cool metal that surrounded it. He flexed his knuckles a little, feeling the connective tissue that webbed between them feel like it might crack in a few places—it was too dry.

“So what brings you here?” came Roy's in-person greeting when he opened the door, backlit by some brighter light that better-illuminated the safe _room_.

“Something has happened—“ Kaldur started to provide.

“I figured that,” Roy interrupted. “What, you guys gone green and don't use lights anymore in the Cave?” he asked as he fumbled around and found a very loud light switch. The glow that illuminated the room was still low and rather amber.

“—There was... a death,” Kaldur responded, inelegantly but efficiently enough. He imagined it would be for Red Arrow, at least. If he went by that name anymore. He wasn't wearing a costume.

“... Anyone I know?” Roy asked, and Kaldur could tell he had at least earned some hesitation from his friend.

“I do not believe you ever had the pleasure of meeting her.”

“The pleasure, huh?” Roy asked. And he smirked but when Kaldur met his eyes directly, he stopped. Kaldur's brows started to tighten down over his eyes, his jaw setting, starting at the back. “... Who... _was_ she?” he followed up the question, and Kaldur's facial muscles relaxed—went slack—because he realized that his company had actually realized for whom he was grieving.

“Tuλa. Aquagirl.”

“'Aquagirl.' Your girl, huh?” Roy asked, and he let out a breath that hollowed out the sound toward the end of his question as he came to the long side of the table while Kaldur stood at the furthest short end. Kaldur gripped a little at the cool metal, but this time he wasn't offended. However, he was silent.

“... Was she new?”

“No. Not _new_. She had received a designation from the Justice League some time ago—for the Team, not the Justice League itself—and she had helped us on several missions. She was helping us when—when she met her end.”

“Oh.” Roy frowned and took off some sunglasses that Kaldur had hardly noticed until they were gone. He was used to having friends who hid their eyes. He heard the faint click as the plastic touched the table and the sound prompted him to move a little around the corner so he was facing Roy but on the same side of the central piece of furniture. There was a cot over in the corner and another few bedrolls, but they were hardly so sturdy or prominent. “Sorry,” he expressed his condolences, and Kaldur felt terrible that Roy's apology actually touched him when nearly all the others had run together.

“... She was very brave, in the end.”

When Kaldur was met with silence he turned to face the way Roy was facing. Somehow they always ended up this way. Side by side. He thought of a corner—opposite sides and side by side and somewhere between.

“I fear I have made this awkward for you,” he commented eventually.

“No,” Roy answered dismissively. “I just... don't know what to do anymore.”

“Do you care to elaborate?”

“With quiet.”

“... Oh. I fear I am losing that conviction as well,” Kaldur admitted. Then he remembered that he had neglected to answer a question his friend had asked him. He had no reason to withhold the answer. It was not as if it would change it. “She was never _mine_. I had long since given up any ambition to that end. We loved but only as friends do. I held a certain... childish affection for her, the effects of which I still cannot shake, but she was my friend and in love with another.”

“Friend? Or just some other guy?”

“... Both, in the end.”

“Oh. Damn. You don't give me much to go on—whether I'm supposed to hate the guy or not. Be sorry for him that his girlfriend died.”

“Roy—“ Kaldur scolded softly. He wouldn't have tried to stop him had he stopped before the last sentence.

“Sorry. I'm not so good with... y'know... _real_ people.”

“Red Arrow, you are—“

“—outta uniform right now.”

“Ah. Yes.” Kaldur looked along the line of his shoulder, gaze tracing the pleasantly and slightly varied slope of his nose. “You asked why I contacted you.”

“Yeah. But you don't have to tell me. I know sometimes _people_ just... do things.”

“You _are_ a person, Roy Harper.”

“So you guys keep telling me,” Roy replied through partially gritted teeth.

Kaldur didn't ask who he meant.

“... I contacted you because I, for the first time today, felt the need to _leave_ the Team. Only for a time, but once I was _outside_ I... immediately thought of you.”

First, Roy chuckled. Kaldur nearly started when he met his eyes. Almost shyly, Kaldur glanced down toward his friend's abandoned sunglasses before leveling his gaze with his once more.

“I'm flattered,” Roy said, only speaking the second time Kaldur met and this time kept his eyes.

“I mean no disrespect, but I am not certain this is exactly what I would consider a compliment.”

“I know. You wouldn't. I walked away that day. You didn't.”

“Yes, but you were—“ But Kaldur stopped. He realized he'd made a mistake.

“Yeah, I was carrying out my programming. I'm well aware.”

Kaldur narrowed his gaze but only to study Roy's eyes a bit better in the dim light.

“You have fulfilled your programming, Roy. You are no less the person you believed you were than—“

“Don't,” Roy warned with a growl to the back of his voice.

“I simply meant that perhaps you have still failed to realize—I say with all due and freely given respect to you, my friend—that you are now, more than ever, free to make your own decisions, choices. Your own _life_.”

“Yeah? And what have I been doing? And what about you? When's your turn?” Roy challenged, hands shoving down into his light jacket's pockets.

Kaldur was silenced and looked down toward his feet. He wriggled his toes. Perhaps Roy had a point.

“... Something I saw back at the Cave, before I took me leave—it has caused me to think. I have been thinking—“

“... Is this some kind of new occupation for you?”

“No. Patience, please,” Kaldur requested as he sought Roy's gaze a bit sidelong this time.

“I'm still listening,” Roy replied, and Kaldur realized he was once again more directly looking at him. He felt distracted and perhaps ashamed enough not to quite return the gesture so readily for a second time.

“I can't stop thinking about her. About what _might_ have been, about what I might have done had I tried again, years later when she and I had both changed. And yet it feels... hollow. I feel that the condolences people give to me for her loss are equally owed to everyone on the Team, even if I _loved_ her longer.”

“Being in love with people comes and goes. Even with the _same_ people,” Roy asserted.

Kaldur suddenly felt himself smiling and returning to a more relaxed posture with regard to looking at Roy, even if he still felt a heavy weight deep in his chest. He wanted to point out that if Roy was right that he knew quite a bit about _human emotion_ for a man eager to deny his own right to them. Before he made another terrible mistake and spoke before he thought, Kaldur stopped himself.

“I suppose you are right, and yet I cannot withdraw the suggestion that I was _in love_ with her from the rest of the Team. It would be an act of disrespect at this point.”

“... So you live with the ghost. We all do. Sounds like yours might be some okay company.”

“Roy, I—“ Kaldur said and there was a sudden and abrupt desperation behind it, a breath he longed to push out but couldn't reach deeply enough into his lungs.

“It gets easier. Or harder. Something you gotta live with, so you... find a way. Some ways.”

“What are yours?”

“No, no,” Roy replied at a fast clip with a half-mocking waggle of his finger. “You don't want to know that. And some of it's not really polite.”

“Roy...” Kaldur breathed, only slightly less desperate. Longing. That's what it was. Longing for something as he turned slightly toward the other man. He wished they had something suddenly. They had known one another all this time, fought side by side even when it hadn't been officially sanctioned by anything but Kaldur's rank itself. And yet they had next to nothing. They didn't share things. Their information was passed between them... dryly. And Kaldur suddenly, intensely, instinctively hated it. He breathed both through his mouth and noted how useless his gills were on the surface and he hated it, his eyes falling on Roy's nose—then upon the very faintly chapped lips at his mouth. He noted that it curved into a weary smirk.

“You need something.”

“Yes,” Kaldur agreed, blindly but his eyes were wide open. He had miscalculated somehow. He knew it, but he had not yet discerned what it meant.

Then he realized. Rather than receiving an answer, he was receiving what felt like much-needed water against his burning lips. Water that came from within Roy Harper's mouth. He tasted it and some hint of toothpaste lingered. The man who was kissing him likely ought to be home, but he was here.

Kaldur reeled. He took a step backward but there was nowhere to go. His jaw slacked and it only made him more vulnerable, opening him up, and he wondered what it would be like to drown.

He reached up and his fingers ran against Roy's cheek, searching for a fault, for some will to push himself away. He found nothing—only the nearly unnaturally soft smoothness that was evidence of the skin recently having been shaved, cleared of all possible blemish.

His parted lips seemed to invite what Roy was doing to him and he felt a pleasant tingling rush over his skin that settled a warmth into his stomach that made him yearn for more. His fingers found Roy's jacket and gripped—and then pulled—and suddenly he remembered the table behind them to which his back very lightly pressed. The moment he remembered, his sense of up and down and gravity was gone for an instant, even less material than when he was in Atlantis. When he resurfaced he was on his back, panting, no longer kissing. He looked up, past Roy's shoulder, at the ceiling and saw only the dull amber glow and a crisscross of insufficiently battled shadows. Then for all intents and intelligent purposes he was blinded while seeing, a shuddering, deep sound issuing from his throat as he felt the warmth and dampness of Roy's tongue brush against his neck. It was fast followed by the pleasantly suckling touch of his lips and he could even hear the wet sound it made as a short path of such kisses made their way back up to his jaw and face, and between the fast-cooling trail of saliva along his neck that made him almost lament as he realized that it was far thicker than water and therefore dried much too fast and the _burning_ in his body, he was completely helpless as his mouth was taken again.

He reached up, floundering and feeling he might fall while Roy's weight pressed down over him and they actually managed to make the sturdy card table shake. There was a friction between their bodies and it moved and started up a rhythm, and Kaldur couldn't _think—_

“Stop,” Kaldur ordered, trying to regain control of the situation, but he gasped and lifted his chin slightly, a shudder running through him as it was he who brushed his lips to Roy's above him. “You have a wife,” he panted.

Then, though he had expected a more painful argument and a more violent _end_ to something, he felt cooler air lick against his mouth and nose. Roy had stopped. Roy had leaned in with his forehead and it touched against Kaldur's temple. The latter sought the former's eyes, but Kaldur found that Roy's eyes were closed. Roy made a motion that was almost like nodding but which only resulted in the brushing of their skin.

“I know,” Roy breathed. A grasping, gripping hand ran against the underside of Kaldur's arm, found his wrist. Then his palm was pressed to another, and Roy tried to entwine their fingers but flinched when he found it not so easy with the forgotten webbing between them. A band of metal touched down at the skin between Kaldur's third and fourth fingers. Roy's eyes opened and he looked at Kaldur, lifting up his head. In his eyes, Kaldur saw a shade of grief. “I know.”

Then they were silent. And Kaldur's eyes were closed. And his mouth was reminded of how dry it was, and how dry it could be, but for the moment the sound of the hungry, damp friction and the heat, the ache it sent through is veins to put it a place it could be set free, was all the ocean he needed—dark and washing what he needed away.


End file.
